NEW DELHI, Dec 26, (RTRS): The Gandhi dynasty that has ruled India for most of the 64 years since independence has kept the world’s largest democracy in poverty, leaders of a protest movement said on Monday as they prepared renewed rallies to target the government on corruption.
A three-day fast led by 74-year-old activist Anna Hazare and a plan for thousands of people to picket the home of Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi on New Years Eve will be a test of strength for the anti-corruption movement that forced a government U-turn in the summer.
“India was not destined to be a poor country, India was destined to be a developed country but corruption has kept it poor,” said Kiran Bedi, a member of Hazare’s inner circle.
“Who has exercised corruption? The party in power, and the party in power for the majority of the years has been the Congress party and in the Congress party, the Gandhi family.”
India’s fast-growing economy is Asia’s third largest but many of the country’s 1.2 billion people suffer from inadequate nutrition and have no electricity.
Hazare plans to begin his hunger strike in Mumbai on Tuesday. Almost 100,000 people have signed up online to express support for the three-day “fill the jails” protest picketing politicians homes and courting arrest.
A fast led by Hazare in August brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets. After initially arresting him and dismissing him as an anarchist, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government caved in to his demands to quickly pass a tougher version of anti-graft legislation first proposed decades ago.
The protests also triggering an ongoing debate about the nature of India’s democracy.
Hazare’s supporters say voting in elections must be supplemented by direct pressure on politicians, while traditional parties say the protests risk “mobocracy.”